This year's Fringe field, from gems to bombs

By colin thomas & kathleen oliver

Publish Date: 8-Sep-2005 (Vancouver, Canada)

NOSTALGIA TRIP TIC This piece contains more intelligence and risk than you sometimes see in a whole season of Vancouver theatre. In examining the character Hermine from Herman Hesse's 1927 novel, Steppenwolf, originator and solo performer Sharon Feder creates a multilayered meditation on the ego's misguided hunt for spiritual transcendence through intense heroic experience and fame.

An image of yearning: as Hermine, Feder walks along a strip of fabric toward an autumnal light, telling Steppenwolf that she recognizes the loneliness inherent in his desire for spiritual glory. Later, a video image of Hermine's vulnerable face is projected onto the actor's body.

The same video plays upstage on a laptop, evoking the sense of a soul lost in darkness. Nostalgia Trip Tic is staggeringly ambitious—and successful.

On tour during summer of 2005 at the Fringe, Nostalgia Trip Tic is an experimental, mixed-media physical theatre performance written and realized for the stage by Canada’s own Sharon Feder. Selected for her first Canadian Fringe tour, Nostalgia Trip Tic opens in Edmonton before going on to Victoria and Vancouver for a month long tour, August 19 to September 18.

Sharon’s latest work, Nostalgia Trip Tic is an international co-production with the French company Pantheatre, and is directed by Enrique Pardo, its artistic director. Founded in 1981, Pantheatre was the first independent company to emerge from the prestigious Roy Hart Theatre in the Languedoc region in the South of France. Sharon completed the creation of Nostalgia Trip Tic as artist in residence at the Roy Hart Centre. Nostalgia Trip Tic premiered there in July at the “Myth and Theatre Festival: Myths of the Voice.”

Nostalgia Trip Tic, is based on an investigation of homesickness, a word synonymous with “nostalgia” in several languages. The wordplay in the title, whereby “triptych” becomes the more metaphorical “trip tic,”
is indicative of the suggestive, multilayered, and experimental quality of Sharon’s work. Each word in the title stands iconically for each segment of the three-part performance. Each neatly encapsulates its meaning and position within the wider philosophical projection of the piece: a meditation on origins and destinations in the context of our postmodern age.

Rich in image, song, and gesture, Nostalgia Trip Tic also uses video and sound interlaced with excerpts of text form Herman Hesse’s Nobel prize-winning 1927 novel, Steppenwolf. Sharon re-reads and re-contextualizes Steppenwolf through the character of Hermine, a hermaphrodite, fortuneteller and prostitute, sister and mirror to Harry, the central character in Hesse’s complex post World War I novel.

Sharon works with and against the resonances offered by the novel’s old world logic. She recreates a parallel hall of mirrors with the novel’s centerpiece “magic theatre”, where similar yet differently fragmented subjects meet at the threshold of the visible and audible worlds. Here the experience of the living/dying, masculine/feminine, dual, multiple and shifting body becomes engaged critically yet passionately, all the while pushing playfully but rigorously against their agonistic limits. The result is as heart bending as it is intellectually and emotionally invigorating.

By intercepting and customizing Hermine’s insightful words, Sharon underscores both, the text’s foreignness and its familiarity from a radically gendered perspective, one that puts the classic representation of sexual difference on the line. The result is a timely commentary on love, war and dislocation offered from a perspective that is as much Canadian and it is global.

Nostalgia Trip Tic premiered in France to critical acclaim.

Sound Moves [www.soundmoves.ca] is a conceptual platform created by Mexican-born Canadian artist, Sharon Feder. It consists of her solo and collaborative creative projects, including performance theatre production, installations, and other related activities in the performing and visual arts.

Pantheatre [www.pantheatre.com] was the first independent company to emerge from the Roy Hart Theatre after Roy Hart's death in 1975. It was founded in 1981 by Enrique Pardo, with a solo performance on the God Pan, following three years of voice and movement research with a circle of actors from the original Roy Hart Theatre Company, including Liza Mayer, Linda Wise, among others.

The Roy Hart Centre [www.roy-hart.com/] is a theatre group and company initially founded by Roy Hart in London in 1969. The Roy Hart Theatre moved to Malérargues, France, in 1974 as a communitarian venture with 40 of its original members. After Roy Hart's death in 1975, the group pursued collective artistic creations until 1989, when a collective decision was taken to dissolve the company and change the name to Roy Hart Centre for future artistic productions.

Myth and Theatre Festival: Myths of the Voice organized by Pantheatre at the Roy Hart Centre, explores the multiple manners in which the voice is conceived of, listened to and used, especially in the arts and therapeutic practices: from pagan oracles to spiritist raps, from Protestant singing to contemporary myths of soul.

Sharon Feder is a performer, director and creator of physical theatre and mixed-media performance. A Canadian artist dedicated to the development of alternative and interdisciplinary performance practice, Sharon Feder creates individually and in collaboration, in Canada and internationally, with artists of different fields and from various backgrounds. Sharon¹s work reflects not only a dedication to the development of performance practice, but also a rigorous investigation of the site of convergence of different artistic forms: theatre, dance, video, film, new media and other sound and image technologies. This year, Sharon creates "Sound Moves", a conceptual platform for her artistic projects, performances, and installations. In February, she organizes "Festival Improbable", three days of improvisation at the Fonderie de Bagnolet with over thirty artists from theatre, dance, music, video and visual arts. At the same festival, she presents "InsideOut" the third in a series of performances in real-time audio visual environments. She is currently preparing her second solo performance "Nostalgia Trip Tic" together with Enrique Pardo of Pantheatre, and will tour it this summer in three different Canadian cities. Sharon has had the honor of receiving financial support and recognition for her artistic projects in Canada and abroad from, Canada Council for the Arts, the BC Arts Council, HRDC (Human Resources Development Canada), and the Canadian Cultural Centre in Paris.